What a tawdry place is tabloid Britain

This not a mean-spirited country. I walked one night last week, for hours, up and down the lovely, wearying streets of Durham, in the company of vast crowds, come for the first night of a splendid city-wide son et lumiere display, and the mood was of what we keep being told is a lost age: courteous, happy, thoughtful, sharing, be it the older tourists, the rather posh students in Paddington scarves or the mad, young, frozen, local souls in cut-off vests and missing skirts. It could have been VE Day. It could have been the spirit of the Blitz. With even better lighting effects and less death. And then I remembered that, in the morning, I'd have to look, again, at some newspapers, and my heart sank.

Who runs us, today, at the windy tail-end of an oddly judgmental year? The government or the press? It's not a new question particularly, but it seems newly relevant. We've had, for instance, that vicious little hounding of Gordon Brown over the condolence letter. Yes, OK, like its author these days, it wasn't the prettiest of beasts. Hassled, harried and clumsy. But who is behaving with the least sensitivity here: a worried PM, having to write yet another guilty yet heartfelt letter, or the team from the Sun who have been manufacturing opprobrium, day after day after day? Even columnist Matthew Parris, one of Brown's steadiest detractors for years now, was moved to say that Brown's phone call had been handled better than it would have been by either a smarmy Blair or a lecturing Thatcher. By now, thankfully, there's been a backlash.

But none, yet, over Sharon Shoesmith. Perhaps you didn't all notice the story, but there was a report into her legal challenge over her sacking by Haringey council after the death of Baby Peter. Early judgments have found, essentially, that Ofsted lied and did so because of media pressure. Their lawyers withheld, even denied the existence of, evidence which could have, if not exactly exonerated Shoesmith, at least set her actions in context. But, no, at that time, with that media mood, rational (or even honest) behaviour wasn't wanted, even from an independent regulator. She had to go and she went.

Here's another. The ongoing MPs' expenses row, which is becoming faintly farcical. I realise that I'm not exactly talking my way into a job in the tabloids here, but I'd still like to suggest, humbly, that:

Gordon Brown behaved honourably and with dignity. Many MPs do a thoroughly difficult, clever, stressful job and don't deserve to have their every chuffing receipt pored over: life's too short, surely, and there used to be a country to run. And Shoesmith shouldn't have been forced out. Not in that fashion and probably not at all. And, while we're at it, I don't really care what Mark Thompson earns – and it's still half that of the editor of the Mail.

What this all has in common is that the agenda is being set by our morning newspapers. (And who said newspapers were dead, by the way: I can't remember a year in which they've been more influential, for both good and ill). This is not new. What is different is that government is now letting them do it.

It's no coincidence that Malcolm Tucker, in The Thick Of It, shows genuine fear only when confronted with the tabloids getting hold of a story. Be it true or not. Which is worrying enough in the programme, but surely terrifying when we realise it's an accurate mirror. No longer does government govern and, when confronted by a rumour or a whisper or an irrelevance or a prejudice, tell the accuser – oh, grow up, so what, and it's not true. They are terrified of and respond to the screams of the tabloids, and, thus, the order goes out. Make that phone call. Excoriate yourself further. Sack her. Apologise, now, even if you haven't done anything wrong. Apologise more. It's not just government: I'm sure even the Observer has been faintly guilty, over the past decade or so, of forgetting how to say, in the face of a non-row filling the pages of dailies, oh, grow up. So what. It's not a story.

I'm not saying we want to go back to the days when government simply sneered at us and interviews were conducted in morning dress and with the interviewer practically on his knees in a parody of deference. Many wholly legitimate press inquiries have exposed and illuminated and clarified and helped (although we still seem perilously far from getting a proper inquiry into the genesis of the Iraq invasion.)

But it has, surely, gone too far. It strikes me that it's like one of those awful rowing couples, always the same person in the wrong. And he (she) will apologise and grovel and apologise more loudly, and eventually, after lengthy silences and many pursed lips, wonder if he or she has been forgiven: the answer comes back: "Oh, for goodness sake, that old thing. I've forgotten about that. What's really annoying me is… "

In other words, a deeply dysfunctional couple. They'll never work. And so it could have been predicted. When the government began to run to every one of the mad skirling tunes of the tabloids, rather than, sometimes, saying: it's not a story. It's not an argument. Shut up. Then the relationship was ever doomed, destined only for years of "And another thing… " and then a bitchy divorce. Alastair Campbell, speaking on Thursday night's The Week, admitted that he thought Labour probably hadn't needed the Sun's support to win in 1997, after all. Now he tells us.

At the time of the hysteria surrounding Diana's death, writer Ian Jack called it "recreational grief". Now, after a decade and more in which the media have changed from asking "What do you think?" to "How do you feel?", we have, on a weekly basis, recreational outrage. It is time, surely, for someone with a backbone in government to stand up, occasionally, and say, oh, grow up, it's not a story. And stop being terrified of the judgment of a gaggle of hacks, pretending oh so disingenuously to reflect the "mood" in the "saloon bars" of middle England. It's not a saloon bar I've ever been in.